I just finished reading the book "Better" by Dr. Atul Gawande and LOVED IT! (the article mentioned above is a chapter in the book). Afterwords I went online and read about 21 of his published articles, and I am now looking forward to reading his second book "Complications" and hope to enjoy it as much.

...Doctors in other fields have always looked down their masked noses on their obstetrical colleagues. Obstetricians used to have trouble attracting the top medical students to their specialty, and there seemed little science or sophistication to what they did. Yet almost nothing else in medicine has saved lives on the scale that obstetrics has. Yes, there have been dazzling changes in what we can do to treat disease and improve people's lives. We now have drugs to stop strokes and to treat cancers; we have coronary-artery stents, artificial joints, and mechanical respirators. But those of us in other fields of medicine don't use these measures anywhere near as reliably and as safely as obstetricians use theirs...